M ost every Sunday I wake up and think: Today I will walk down to the Poolbeg Lighthouse. Today I will take a bracing walk. Today I will fill my lungs with sea air, navigate the grand granite walkway that is the South Great Wall, perambulate past the Half Moon swimming club where my father used to jump off rocks and where I once saw a man balance a baby, high in the air, on one hand. Today I will walk all the way down to the Poolbeg Lighthouse, dragging two daughters, telling them why the lighthouse is painted red and we will point at ships and wonder where they’ve come from and where they are going.
And Sundays come and Sundays go and it never happens. I think it is because I’ve stopped moving any distance. And because, in every sense, the lighthouse seems too far away.
I blame Spencer Tunick. The last time I took a proper walk down there I was writing an article about the mass naked photoshoot, bare bottoms as far as the eye could see all along the Great South Wall. And then on a whim I decided to join in.
Afterwards, I couldn’t find my clothes, neat piles of clobber on the sand as far as the eye could see, and yes, that is as excruciating a scenario as it sounds. I think it put me off. That and the not moving any distance thing.
My runners are under the bed somewhere. I tell myself they are lost. It’s easier that way.
But this one Sunday I wake feeling resolved. I know I am going to walk the walk. There is a sign I have in my kitchen which I’ve made my children learn off my heart, in the hope that if I do nothing else as a parent the words of the Dalai Lama might sometimes pop into their heads at just the right moment and settle something in their souls.
“Every day think as you wake up. Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it.”
They groan as they recite it, the way they groaned when my brother taught them to recite The Song of Wandering Aengus by WB Yeats but with actions. My brother says he will teach them to recite a Yeats poem every year and in my book being able to recite Yeats (with actions) is a valuable life skill.
I am not going to waste it. I think going to visit Gerry Pinkster in St Vincent’s Hospital is what has the Dalai Lama’s words humming around my head with more vibrancy than usual. Gerry reads this column and came to an event I hosted. We chatted. His wife Margaret had come to see Ross O’Carroll-Kelly and Gerry had come to see me. When his health took a turn, Margaret asked me to come to the hospital for a surprise visit. When I go into his room we hug and kiss, not like people who are meeting for the second time but like people who want to make the encounter count.
And it does. Gerry seems to me the kind of person who always knew, without the Dalai Lama’s help, that he had a precious human life and he was not going to waste it.
He sailed out with the Dún Laoghaire yacht club, he took crazy trips on his Harley with his wife Margaret on the back of the bike, he was a great father and charming to everyone, that’s what everyone says. He was good. He smiles that huge smile and quotes lines from my columns back to me. He tells the story of how his family fled Amsterdam on a canal barge to England when the Nazis invaded. How later the family came to Ireland and his father started a shipping business. Gerry talks and I listen and we hold hands.
“You’ve had some life,” I say when he is tired and it is time to go.
“I’m just sorry,” Gerry says, “that the party has been cut short”.
He is 79.
I wake the following Sunday, resolved. I drag my daughters down to the Poolbeg Lighthouse. I try to quieten the cries of “BORING” and “FREEZING” with something else.
“What do you feel in the moment?” I say. And one says the wind messing her hair, and the other says the smell of the sea and we listen to the sound of gulls and then: “I know you want us to be in the moment but after this what are we going to do next?” And we laugh.
The lighthouse is painted red because red represents portside. A ship passes and we point. It's called Yasmine, and it's probably going back to Luxembourg.
“Is that a country?”
“It is.”
I have a precious human life. I am going move into the distance, walk the walk, try not to waste it. Thank you Gerry.
roisin@irishtimes.com